Each document, reference, patent application, or patent cited in this text is expressly incorporated herein in their entirety by reference, which means that it should be read and considered by the reader as part of this text. That the document, reference, patent application, or patent cited in this text is not repeated in this text is merely for reasons of conciseness.
The following discussion of the background to the invention is intended to facilitate an understanding of the present invention only. It should be appreciated that the discussion is not an acknowledgement or admission that any of the material referred to was published, known or part of the common general knowledge of the person skilled in the art in any jurisdiction as at the priority date of the invention.
Fixed Mobile Convergence (“FMC”) is a term used in the art for the integration of fixed and mobile networks to provide a single communication network foundation. For example, in an enterprise environment, FMC solutions can be applied to provide users with seamless services using a combination of fixed and mobile networks. By way of an example, a user may be engaged in a phone call on a mobile phone with another person via a mobile network. When the user enters an office (i.e., moves within the enterprise environment), the FMC can enable the phone call in progress on the mobile phone to be seamlessly handed over from the mobile network to the enterprise network (e.g., on a wireless Local Area Network (“LAN”) via Voice over IP (“VoIP”)). This can result in cost savings for the user as the phone call is being established on the enterprise network when within coverage instead of the mobile network operated by telephone companies.
In addition, FMC solutions can be applied to provide users with additional functionalities, such as call diversion, simultaneous ringing, and sequential ringing. The call diversion function allows a call in progress to be transferred from an office desk phone to a mobile phone and vice versa. The simultaneous ringing function allows an incoming call to a fixed line number to reach both the associated desk phone and mobile phone such that they ring simultaneously. The sequential ringing function allows an incoming call to a fixed line number to reach both the associated desk phone and mobile phone such that they ring sequentially. These functions assume that the mobile phone is within range of the enterprise network (e.g., enterprise's Wi-Fi network) and that the above-described call alerts and subsequent connections are made over the Wi-Fi network, rather than being transferred out to the mobile network.
However, although there are benefits associated with adopting FMC solutions in an enterprise environment as discussed above, there exist adoption barriers which may cause enterprises to either delay or decide against implementing FMC solutions.
For example, existing methods of deploying FMC solutions in an enterprise requires the manual re-programming of the enterprise's Private Branch Exchange (“PBX”) to re-configure, for example, the call route table within the PBX. This manual re-programming task is often time-consuming and expensive as well as being error-prone. The need to manually re-program the PBX is driven mostly by the plethora of different PBX systems on the market today, whereby each PBX system has its particular individual configuration protocol and management interface.
As a result, the above factors may be sufficient to sway enterprises away from adopting FMC solutions and present barriers to large scale adoption of FMC solutions in general.
It is against this background that the present invention has been developed.